The Samoan language is spoken in American Samoa, Tokelau, and Swains Island. It is the official language in Samoa.
Samoan has three dialects: Samoan, M’ori, and English. The first two dialects are closely related, while English is not a part of them.
Status
Samoan is an official language in both Western Samoa and American Samoa, and it has widespread practical, pedagogical, and media applications.
Western Samoa is home to several newspapers published in both Samoan and English and several educational institutions.
There is a strong presence of Samoan culture in New Zealand, the Cook Islands, and Australia, where the language is also spoken. Samoan culture has been established in these countries for centuries, with many having Samoan ancestry.
Dialects
There are no significant differences between the various Samoan dialects. However, the language used to address chiefs and other people of higher status is very different from the language used in everyday colloquial conversation.
This difference is significant in the various Samoan dialects.
Structure
Samoan is a member of the Samoic-Outlier subgroup of Polynesian languages, which includes all other Polynesian languages except Tongan and Niuean (which are part of Central Eastern Polynesian). It is also related to Tokelauan and Tuvaluan.
Samoan has about 60,000 speakers in Samoa and American Samoa. There are also small communities in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii where people speak Samoan and other languages such as English or Maori.
Sound System of Samoan Language
Samoans have a limited number of phonemes, or individual sounds, that distinguish one word from another.
It is similar to other Austronesian languages in that it has a lot of vowels and few consonants. It also has a syllabic structure in which a vowel or a consonant and a vowel can only split a word.
Those consonant clusters are absent in Samoan; instead, they’re replaced by glottal stops (e.g., “tau” becomes “tau”).
Vowels and Consonants
There are five vowel phonemes in Samoan, each of which contributes meaning to a word. It is possible to have either long or short vowels, and word meanings can vary depending on the number of vowels.
A macron placed over a vowel indicates its length. The language also contains seven other diphthongs (/au, ao, a, i, ae, ei, ou, ue/). Samoan has 13 consonant phonemes: /b d f g h k l m n p s t v w/. Consonants in parentheses occur exclusively in loanwords.
Samoans have a complicated way of showing groups of consonants by writing one consonant after another. Any two or more consonants that occur together are called consonant clusters.
Grammar
As you may have guessed, Samoan is a Polynesian language, which is very different from English and other European languages. If you’re learning Samoan, then some basic things about how we speak will initially seem strange to you.
Samoan is an isolating language in which words are not inflected. As such, there are no articles (a, an, or the) or gender in the language; you use one word for everything.
Nouns and Pronouns
Prepositions denote syntactic relationships. That’s the case with the prepositions o, and an indicate possession; for example, “the wife of the chief” is “o le faletua o le ali’i.”
In Tok Pisin, the first-person singular pronouns have a form that includes the addressee and a state that doesn’t. This is similar to how other Austronesian languages work.
In English, singular, dual, and plural numbers are indicated by corresponding personal pronouns (e.g., I/me versus We/us).
In Samoan, pronouns only exist for the first person (I/me); there are no second or third-person pronouns; instead, these roles are indicated by context or verb endings (“you” becomes “yau” when combined with certain verbs).
Verbs
The first thing you should know about Samoan verbs is that they are essential to a sentence. Verbs are not marked for person, so it’s up to context and agreement with other words in your sentence to tell you who did what.
The second thing you should know about Samoan verbs is how they are written: all Samoan words are written with an initial capital letter (like English), but unlike English, there are no spaces between words or punctuation marks.
So if we were writing out our previous example sentence, “I ate” (A’e ui), it would look like this: A’E UI.
Vocabulary
Because Samoan is classified as a Polynesian language, its origins can be traced back to the languages spoken by the people who first inhabited the Pacific Islands.
The other Polynesian languages, such as Hawaiian, Maori, and Tongan, are related to Samoans in a very close way.
There are a lot of words in Samoan that come from other languages, like Japanese and Chinese, as well as English.
Work order
Samoan is an Austronesian language spoken by approximately 65,000 people in Samoa and American Samoa. It is a member of the Samoic branch of the Polynesian language family.
Since the country broke away from New Zealand in 1962, English has significantly impacted the language. However, it still has some features that make it different from other Polynesian languages.
Registers
When speaking to people of higher status, such as tulfale (orator chiefs) and alii (high chiefs), government officials, teachers, ministers, and elders, a special “politeness” register (gagana fa’aaloalo) is used.
According to traditional Samoan beliefs, the use of honorific terms is a crucial feature of this register.
The verb tausami (eat), for example, when addressing a chief, would be taute, while one would use it when speaking about oneself: ko teu mai teu tena pea nei e lelei.
Writing
Samoan is written in the Latin alphabet. However, an altered version of the Latin alphabet is used to write in Samoan, with only 15 letters total.
Only H and K are used when creating loanwords from English or other languages; R only appears when it follows an L or N.
The Samoan language uses the same alphabet as Tongan and other Polynesian languages, such as Hawaiian (which also uses all five vowels).
Conclusion
This language is one of the most interesting ones you will ever come across. It’s so beautiful and intricate, with many different dialects and variations.
Hopefully, this article has provided some insight into the Samoan language, but remember that there is always more to learn!